While there are a growing number of digital touch points for customer to business interactions, such as email and social media, for many enterprises three touch points still currently dominate—a physical storefront, a website, and a voice contact center. The manner that a customer typically interacted with each of these touch points has been walking into an establishment, surfing to the corporate website via a computer, and dialing a toll-free 1-800 number from a telephone. The rapid adoption of mobile and the penetration of smartphones within the mobile arena are providing an opportunity to transform how customers experience these touch points. When a customer walks into a retail location, they predictably have a mobile device with them. When a customer visits a corporate website, there is a high probability they are surfing from a mobile smartphone or tablet. When a customer dials a toll-free 1-800 number, they are now typically calling from a mobile smartphone.
In each of these situations, there is a strong desire to provide an optimal mobile experience. Many retail locations are aggressively transforming to leverage the customer's mobile smartphone—from Quick Response (QR) codes that can be scanned for supplementary information and special offers, tracking a customer's location within the store, and accepting payments directly from the mobile device, to name a few. Corporate websites have also transformed to accommodate the adoption of smartphones. In the past, enterprises were happy enough to push a website that was designed for a stationary desktop computer with a large screen and a mouse to a smartphone. In today's world, this was no longer sufficient, thus enterprises enhanced website surfing for mobile customers. Simply, if a customer was attempting to access a corporate website from a smartphone, this was detected and the customer was redirected to the mobile web where an optimized version of the website for smartphones resided.
Unlike these transformations described above, when a mobile customer calls a toll-free 1-800 number with a smartphone to reach a contact center, their experience is no better, and sometimes even worse, than a customer calling from a basic telephone at home. The Mobile Bonded Network solution addresses this significant industry gap without requiring a complete refactoring of existing contact centers.
1-800 toll-free service was invented for the era where national calls were tariffed differently than local calls. Calls placed outside a local calling area would incur a charge. Businesses had two options for offering a service for customers to call them and not wanting the customer to incur a charge from telephony service providers. They could secure numbers for each local calling area. Besides being expensive to source, this approach presents the challenges to educate customers about what number they should dial to reach the business and further, to aggregate such calls efficiently for contact center ingress. Instead, most businesses opted for a common number that was addressable nationwide and would carry a specific route such that calls made to that number would not incur a charge to the caller, but instead would be paid for by the enterprise being reached. An entire industry was born from that innovation. In today's modern world, a significant majority of calls coming into contact centers are originating from mobile devices. In America, mobile calling plans do not distinguish between local and non-local calls, thus toll-free service no longer presents a benefit to the caller; however it still causes the enterprise to incur significant charges.
Furthermore, the toll-free number service offered to enterprises from carriers included the ability to pass supplementary information, specifically Automatic Number Identification (ANI). Enterprises leveraged this basic information to assist in routing decisions and customer identification. However, in today's modern world, the value of ANI has decreased significantly. Number portability, an initiative to support mobile users, has rendered implied location from ANI, used in routing decisions, largely ineffective. Additionally, the ability for customers to easily spoof their Caller Identification (CLID) has made identifying customers based on it essentially useless.
And finally, the toll-free services launched by carriers made the assumption that a customer was initiating their call from a landline telephone. Because of this assumption, the toll-free services only considered the voice channel into the contact center, the quality of this connection was without question, and the only viable method to interact with automated systems was via audible menus and touchtone responses. In today's modern world, this base assumption and resulting postulations are no longer valid. Mobile smartphones support many channels other than voice that customers want to leverage, the quality and stability of the mobile connection cannot be taken for granted, and the mobile smartphone has the capabilities to provide a rich visual interaction experience through a touchscreen interface.